American Laser Games (Mad Dog McCree and others)

[phasermaniac]

Hi! I got a job and so now I can spend money in manchild things.
Do you know If you buy Crime Patrol Bundle you get the thre separated games or it is a 3 in 1 compilation game?
Thanks

[jwallace]

Looking at what apeezyfosheezy has said, are those captures still in the LDIMG format, or something else?

When I did Gallagher's gallery, it was a stock LDIMG that I managed to get the video and audio tracks out of, and since they were basically JPEGs I did the conversion as MJPEG.

IIRC, the Singe versions were designed around custom game code, so the frame offsets aren't the same as the original laserdiscs. Certainly some of the RDG generated games were very different, as I know at least one of them contains high score handlign that never existed in the real version.

I knew if I stayed away long enough cool things would happen though, and I guess I'll have to catch up over the holidays on this

[vulture]

So guys, need some help here. You see, DamienD purchased all the ALG/Dexter images as seen in the screenshot:



Now, we just need to work out how to convert them to a format usable with WinUAE.

Any suggestions?

Thx!

[phasermaniac]

I don't know, but it would be amazing.
I understand that by now, it only can be done with a dexter unit, right?

[jwallace]

Well, if they're anything like the thing I found, it's basically still images and snippets of sound in a big data blob. I know there's some fancier compression on some parts of it, but the whole point of them is to be read framewise pretty damn fast, so it's probably not doing anything too hard.

[DamienD]

Heya all,

This will be my one and only final post on EAB since my 7 month banning expired on the 30th of November...

Thank you to apeezyfosheezy for informing us all of the legal method in which to purchase the Dexter images of ALG games.

...unfortunately that's not enough though; you won't be able to do so. Trust me, I tried and failed.

So 3 months back, I purchased all ALG titles, but afterwards ended up swapping numerous e-mails back and forth with Matt.

Matt is not prepared to sell just the video files if you do not own a Dexter unit, which he of course sells; and ended up refunding my purchase.

I won't go into further details, but let me just say that I went through months of hardship and these probably cost me more than double what they should have in order to acquire.

Anyway, these original ALG video files are in .LDIMG format.

Next thing to do was to work out how to create usaable .AVIs from these .LDIMG files... luckily one very knowledgable / helpful gentleman, who wishes to remain anonymous, stepped forward

It's not the most straight forward process, and takes about 4 hours per game to process. High level details are as follows:

• Rip the 200,000 plus individual .PCM, .JPG and .YUV files from the .LDIMG file.
• Pad / rename the .PCM, .JPG and .YUV files into a logical sorting order.
• Combine the .PCM files into a .RAW audio file.
• Convert this .RAW audio file into a .WAV file.
• In VirtualDub2, load all .JPG files and the .WAV file, select various settings and encode the final .AVI.

When encoding the .AVI I used the Xvid codec with the highest quality setting. I also tried using ffdshow and Lagarith, but the quality wasn't as good, and the resulting file was 2 to 3 times larger.

These are the details of the .AVIs:

• 720 x 480 resolution.
• 59.940 fps.
• .MP3 320 kbps.

A note regarding "Fast Draw Showdown". The data in the .LDIMG file is the wrong orientation:



I've produced two .AVIs, you want to use the second one:

1. Fast Draw Showdown [American Laser Games]_original.rar
2. Fast Draw Showdown [American Laser Games]_rotated.rar

Anyway, all available ALG titles are currently uploading to the TURRAN FTP under my account for your playing enjoymemt

The reason I've done this is two fold:

1. This does not take away any business from Matt. These converted .AVI files are absolutely useless in anything besides WinUAE.
2. Matt did say to me, if I can somehow acquire the images from the one and only person he sold these to, who didn't actually own a Dexter unit, then all good... and I quote below from the e-mail I received:

====================================================================================================


Hi Damien,

It is true that I did a one-off favor for someone else in regards to these images. However, I am in the business of selling hardware that includes software, not selling raw .AVIs.

So if you can convince your contact to share with you what I shared with him, then I think that would be a reasonable compromise here. If not, I will be happy to either sell you a Dexter unit loaded with the images you purchased (in the .LDIMG file format that I linked earlier) or refund you for what you paid.


====================================================================================================


So guys, enjoy!!! This is my last contribution of many to the Amiga scene. Adios amigos!!!

Oops, oh yeah... my collection is still being actively worked on / improved constantly; and has been all throughout my ban. If you want to continue to get updates then please don't try to do so via EAB, as you will get no response. There are other methods to contact me

[vulture]

Congrats D and many many thx for this!

[jwallace]

Ooh, nice!

IIRC, Fast Draw is meant to look like that, because the monitor is rotated 90 degrees in the cabinet (most of the gameplay is about taking on quickdraw contests one on one, so this allows them to look bigger).

I don't know what that will actually mean for the emulation, as rotating the image will mean rotating the input space as well, but it's nice to have this around for the future anyway.

So, do you think this method will work for the other games (Platoon, Marbella Vice, etc) if they're ever found?

[dax]

Thank You once again, Mr Damien!

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by DamienD

So guys, enjoy!!! This is my last contribution of many to the Amiga scene. Adios amigos!!!

All the best to you. This time I support the decision, 7 months is a bit over the top.

[DamienD]

Houston we have a problem.

The .AVIs produced using Xvid play absolutely perfect via VLC.

...but, have just setup some games in WinUAE and there are issues.

My anonymous helper did say that sometimes videos encoded with Xvid can have seek issues

That's exactly what I'm seeing

So, all images deleted and will now need to be processed again using ffdshow.

Fun, fun!!!

[jwallace]

Ah, now I did have that with Platoon when I ripped it from youtube - someone more knowledgable than me might know why, but I seem to think that the current AVI code seeks by time to an appropriate frame based on the frame rate, and depending on how many frames there are from the last key frame to that point, it can overshoot or undershoot and generally break up. I didn't use Xvid though, it was some standard MPEg-4 thing that was the same, but not.

I ended up using some MJPEG codec I found in K-Lite to try to force loads of keyframes and it sort of worked, but it still seems a bit choppy even now. I guess it's because AVi isn't meant to do what this is forcing it to.

[Zarnal]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Houston we have a problem.

...but, have just setup some games in WinUAE and there are issues.

What titles are affected ?

[phasermaniac]

Hi! I am just testing Crime patrol 2 which I donwloaded yesterday and seems to work fine

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Zarnal

What titles are affected ?

I only setup / tried these earlier today, and they were definitely having issues with seek problems:

... Gallagher's Gallery
... Mad Dog McCree
... Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold

[phasermaniac]

Hi! The resolution its ok for me because I use a crt at 360x240.
The only problem I see is the tearing. In an LCD at 720x480 I see tearing but it's not so noticeable.
Do you know if I can do anything to improve this? should I resize the videos to 360x240?
I teted Gallaghers Gallery and for me its having the issues with seek problems you said.
thanks!

[mrbabbage]

Finally got activated here, so I thought i'd leap in, since I'm the Mr Nobody Damien was protecting (which I appreciate, by the way).

In the original LDIMG files, you can have perfect seek to a frame, since there's a big lookup table that says where every image and bit of sound is, and none of them rely on other frames. As soon as you start putting that stuff in an AVI container, there is an index to seek to, that's not a problem, but what is is that you end up with a situation whereby (for compression reasons) a particular frame might be stored as a list of changes based on a frame some significant way away in the file. This starts to create a problem. What we did notice is that some of the more common codecs out there seemed to be worse for this than others, and depending even on the nature of the video this happens more some places than others.

I don't have a lot of expertise with video encoding in this sense (I'm more of a resource hacker), but I start asking myself if there's a codec solution out there that isn't ridiculous file sizes but doesn't have as much inter frame compression?

As for the tearing, that may well be an artefact of the compression again - these are interlaced images in the original container (odd lines in one image, even lines in another). These are assembled as progressive frames in the video encoder, but LCDs will show up the issues, and would do on the source material too.

[Zarnal]

But why recompress the images contained in these files (if not to reduce the size)? Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a 1:1 reproduction (YUV or RGB Tiff) in the AVI container? I guess the original LD is already compressed with a lossless codec. Is an additional recompression really necessary?

[mrbabbage]

You raise an interesting point, and one I've actually been debating for some time.
The internals of this are, at their simplest description, akin to an MJPEG video with PCM audio, with other data for improving compression (the base table of the JPEG is only stored once, for example) and storing things like the VBlank data (which is incredibly useful for tracking frames within real players, as well as other encoded data for player features).

The same principles I used to get the raw image data out of these for damien's conversion could be used to put together a player for the files themselves, but given the commercial nature of these files, I'd be massively uncomfortable with anything that promoted the distribution of the raw LDIMG files outside of the current commercial terms used. By making this other, downgrading step, it does protect the 'real' files for the application they were designed for.

Alternatively, if someone knew of a way to put JPG and raw 16-bit PCM into an AVI container that didn't involve transcoding, this would solve the problem, but I don't know if even ffmpeg can be made to do that without some other compression to hand.

[Exodous]

I wanted to do something very similar a couple of years ago for a project I was working on, albeit on a lot smaller scale with only 100 images. At the time, I came across the following page, so saved a link to it along with my project, so I could find it again:

https://superuser.com/questions/3474...mages-using-ff

I don't know if it is helpful here?